Cara Kelly is a composer and sound artist from Galway, Ireland. Her practice lives at what she calls the threshold — of sound, language, technology, folklore, myth, and poetry — and her approach to composition is rooted in research, respect for the source material, and a sensitivity to the hidden connections between things.

When she encountered the River Lech, she noticed a linguistic thread connecting her native Irish to the river’s name. The Irish word leac — a large flat stone, traditionally placed at the entrance to a home — shares an ancient Celtic root with Lech, itself meaning the stony one. Two languages, centuries and geography apart, carrying the same memory of stone and water.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 9 of the River Lech — the first free-flowing segment coming from downstream, near Pflach in Austria, where alternating sediment bars meet the industrial noise of a gravel extraction factory processing material dug directly from the riverbed. A place where the river’s geological memory and its present-day exploitation exist side by side.

Her composition is called Segment No. 9.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

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